Timely and reliable information dissemination and delivery in high user-capacity environments is a key requirement in the successful completion of a mission or other task and, in life-threatening environments, ensuring the safety of personnel conducting the mission. In these kinds of environments, centralized content delivery systems—typically referred to as “servers”—are used to distribute information in a real-time or near real-time manner.
This type of centralized architecture, while generally functional, suffers from at least two significant drawbacks: 1) the reliance on a central server or cluster of servers that all endpoints directly or indirectly connect to or otherwise communicate with; and 2) inefficient use of available network bandwidth to deliver the information to the endpoints that require such information.
While there are variations on the theme of centralized servers—for example dividing the server cluster into multiple layers and clusters to achieve a notion of “divide and conquer”—the server-based architecture still generally suffers from the same basic issue: endpoints that require information have some sort of subscription in place that causes the server(s) to forward information to each endpoint as that information becomes available or is modified. This leads to the second major drawback of a server-based architecture where oftentimes scarce network resources are stretched to the point where information simply cannot be reliably delivered or where the time to deliver the information in a reliable manner exceeds the useful age of that information. For example: delivery of crucial mission intelligence to mission coordinators (such as rescue workers or mission commanders) on the ground may be delayed to the point where, by the time that intelligence reaches workers, the information is no longer useful—potentially placing lives and the mission at risk.
There are various methods of synchronizing data between serverless networked nodes, a field of study overlapping peer-to-peer networking and distributed networking. There are typically 2 lines of design: high-bandwidth and low-bandwidth. High-bandwidth peer-to-peer architecture aims at utilizing the most bandwidth possible to achieve fast file transfers and is usually not concerned with network congestions: these designs are at the application layer and they assume appropriate network conditions. On the other hand, low-bandwidth solutions are concerned with and interact at the network layer but their implementation and customization of the layers below the Transport layer on the ISO stack often translate into a reduced flexibility in term of network topology and heterogeneity; for instance wireless mesh networking designs often rely on a modified IP stack implemented at every node.